Looking into the heart of Glass

“I do everything late!” she says, laughing, on the phone from her home in Marblehead. “I had my first child at 39 and didn’t publish my first book till I was 46.”

Even so, Glass proves the old adage about slow and steady. Her first novel, “Three Junes,” won the National Book Award when it appeared in 2002, beating out established authors and up-and-coming literary darlings alike. Now Glass is winding up a national tour to promote her sixth work of fiction, “A House Among the Trees,” loosely inspired by the beloved (and notoriously eccentric) children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Glass will discuss her new novel at the second annual Provincetown Book Festival at the Provincetown Public Library, where she will appear at the festival’s closing event, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 16, in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo.

“Richard Russo is one of my heroes,” Glass says. “When my first novel came out, I knew no one. I didn’t have an MFA and had zero connections. But Richard blurbed my book! It was an amazing act of generosity, which I try to pay forward by reviewing new authors’ books whenever I can.”

Glass is no stranger to Provincetown, having taught summer fiction workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center since 2005. She’s also one of the co-founders and directors of Twenty Summers, the arts program that brings music, visual arts and literature to the Hawthorne Barn during the shoulder season in May and June.

“P’town is a wonderful place, where you can kick up your heels and party dusk till dawn, but still get an incredible amount of work done,” Glass says. “It’s inspiring.”

It’s obvious that wherever she may find herself, Glass is capable of the kind of hard work and determination to which most people can only aspire. “Three Junes” was written while Glass was raising her first son in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment, supporting herself through full-time freelance writing and editing gigs.

“It took me seven years to publish my first story,” she recalls. “I’d wait breathlessly for that envelope to come back in the mail. Sometimes I got encouraging rejections. Those kept me at it, but what really lit a fire under me to write ‘Three Junes’ was the birth of my first child.”

She ruefully notes that “a lot of women get the question ‘How do you do it with small children?,’” though men are rarely if ever asked how they balance the domestic and imaginative spheres. But Glass says becoming a mother reordered her world for the better.

“Having a baby made me realize that if I was going to succeed I had to get cracking,” she explains. “When you have children, your life may narrow, but it deepens. As your children begin to ask you questions, they put you in a position of having to be more honest than you have ever been in your life. When your child is brushing his teeth and asks you, ‘Am I going to die?’ Or when, on 9/11, your kindergartner asks why those men flew the plane into the building? It makes you get serious about your worldview. For me, there’s absolutely no emotional or creative conflict.” Indeed, she says that much of her own experience of child-rearing went into her second novel, “The Whole World Over.”

Those familiar with Glass’s work will recognize in “A House Among the Trees” her signature practice of telling a story through several characters’ perspectives. In “Three Junes” Glass traced the lives of the McLeod family, with each of its three parts told by a different family member. “A House Among the Trees,” too, uses this device, unfolding the story of children’s book author Mort Lear through the eyes of the people closest to him, who are left to pick up the pieces after Lear’s sudden death.

“Although Mort emerges as a character, he’s not really the most important figure in the book,” says Glass. “I wanted to write about what it’s like to be in the orbit of a great creative genius. It’s about these people who are left holding the responsibility for this person’s creative and personal legacy.”

Glass, who trained as a painter and loves color and form, has always taken delight in rendering a setting in her writing. (She says the honor she’s most proud of is the “Sense of Place” award she received from an arts organization in Rochester, N.Y.) In “A House Among the Trees,” her two lives as painter and writer fed each other in a surprising way.

“When you make art there are physical objects that remind you that you’re really doing something. When you write a novel or story or poem it feels so ethereal. I don’t think I had realized what an enormous joy it would be to me to write a novel that addresses the making of both art and books.”

It’s a fusion that ought to be well received in Provincetown, with its legacy as a haven to both great writers and painters. On Saturday at the Book Festival, Glass will help to prove how alive that legacy still is.